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Youth is relative: thirty-four may be young for a politician, but it is not, actually, all that young. On the ninety-first day of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty, a group of five truly young New Yorkers convened in a physics classroom at the Bronx High School of Science—Mamdani’s alma mater—to discuss his time in office so far. It was April 1st, the last day before spring break, and outside, a humid warmth that would be foul in July was, for now, novel and welcome.

“One of my memories of being at Science,” Mamdani told me a few days later, “was being surrounded by people smarter than myself, and that is something I continue to have the privilege of experiencing each and every day at City Hall.” Bronx Science is one of the highly competitive specialized New York City public high schools where access to a free, élite education rests on a single admissions test. As such, it is at once a symbol of the city’s grandest opportunities (because anyone can take that test and, if they score well enough, attend) and of its most entrenched inequalities (because this process routinely results in student populations with far lower percentages of Black and Latino students than in the public-school system as a whole). Mamdani, who graduated in 2010, seemingly sees it both ways. He has criticized the admissions test as a mechanism that perpetuates educational segregation. But he has also described Bronx Science as the place where his understanding of the city expanded beyond his parents’ Ivy League milieu, where he made friends with kids from similar immigrant backgrounds and became “proud of [his] brownness,” as he once put it in a podcast interview. The school “introduced me to the breadth of life across New York City,” he told me.

Throughout the 2025-26 school year, the Mayor had enjoyed the status of a home-town hero on campus. “I really think there’s very few places that have as much support for him as the Bronx Science student body,” Cooper, an animated junior in a polo shirt, told me that day in the physics classroom. “Everyone felt this pride toward him.” Students found the scale of Mamdani’s ambition exciting in itself. “He’s advocating for this progress that I feel like we haven’t seen in politics,” Cooper went on. “At least in our, like, remembered lifetime. Which is kind of sad to say.”

“I do have to agree with Cooper,” Kyle, the sole senior in the group, said. “Before him, I always felt like the world was unchangeable. Like, this is the way things are; we have to follow this structure.” Mamdani’s unexpected electoral triumph had called such received wisdom into question.

Scattered on the classroom whiteboards were equations, a few desultory doodles, a thunderhead cloud of cramped A.P. U.S. History notes about the Spanish-American War (“Progressivism → idk”), and, written in Japanese, “I like Stray Kids,” referring to a K-pop boy band. Shelves of small cacti under grow lights filled one window. Joan, a junior in glasses with thick black frames, said that he was impressed with Mamdani’s 2-K and 3-K efforts. Child care was something that his parents had worried about after arriving from the Dominican Republic. “I know a lot of family and friends who would have really benefitted from a program like that,” he said.

Mariam, a junior, wore a loosely draped black head scarf. She said that she liked the degree to which Mamdani seemed immersed in New York’s daily life. “The fact that he took the subway,” she said. “Isn’t this guy supposed to be in a limousine?” Her commute involved taking the 2 train to the 4, with a transfer at 149th Street, a stop that she called “a red flag to transit New Yorkers,” because “drug use is extremely prevalent”—something she hoped Mamdani could address.

There were knowing nods from the rest of the group regarding 149th Street. Namira, another junior, said that she didn’t take public transportation very much, in part because of her parents’ safety concerns.

Namira, whose dark hair had burgundy streaks, wore hoop earrings and a tangle of gold necklaces. “My parents are really supportive of Mamdani, because I come from similar religious and cultural backgrounds,” she said. “I’m Bengali.” Namira lives in East Elmhurst, where several bus stops had recently been removed, disrupting her mother’s commute to Times Square and inspiring her to action. “My mom has a history of not being trusting of politicians in general,” Namira said. “But recently she took the liberty of e-mailing Mamdani.” Namira’s mother often asks her children to copy-edit her e-mails. This time, Namira said, “We made her send it as it was, because we just thought it added to the factor of, like, Mamdani would understand.”

The Mayor was, the group agreed, someone who they could easily imagine as a Bronx Science student. To judge by the present company, this meant ambitious and busy. The students had a dense roster of extracurriculars among them: student government; debate; Model U.N.; National Honor Society; newspaper; and groups that, variously, opposed bullying, promoted restorative justice, and provided test prep. Namira hoped eventually to study journalism and international relations. Cooper, a self-described “well-rounded student,” professed an interest in education policy; previously, he had worked for the Bronx congressman Ritchie Torres.

As the students held forth on community, diversity, and under-resourced schools, they all sounded slightly as though they were running for something, however yet undefined. They spoke like people who were accustomed to being evaluated, and accepted it with good humor. The ordeal of admissions was still present in the minds of upperclassmen, as was the fact of Stuyvesant, the public-high-school Harvard to Bronx Science’s Yale. Mamdani, for one, has admitted that he didn’t get into Stuyvesant. (“Mamdani plans to convert Stuyvesant High School into a government-owned mixed-use building,” the Stuyvesant Spectator reported, in a humor piece.)

Cooper volunteered that he’d ranked Bronx Science as his first choice, against his parents’ wishes. “They wanted me to go to Stuyvesant,” he said.

“Similar to Cooper, I did choose Bronx Science over Stuyvesant,” Kyle noted.

Mariam explained that she’d been admitted to Bronx Science through a program called Discovery, for students from disadvantaged backgrounds whose test scores fell just below the school’s cutoff line. “I got that e-mail—I was, like, wow, the school must really want me to come here,” she said. Her story was a reminder that the school’s promise and its limitations were difficult to disentangle.

First-year politicians and élite high-school students have something in common. They both have gotten what they want—they got in!—only to find that the hard work begins all over again. Mamdani’s freshman year in office has barely started, but, as anyone who’s been a high schooler knows, four years can go by shockingly fast. On the way to the next goal—reëlection, college admission—both groups must clear a series of hurdles made up of largely artificial deadlines and events: a press conference, a ribbon cutting, a semester, or, for a mayoral administration, the first hundred days.

Such deadlines lend themselves to compressed frenzies of activity. On day ninety-seven, Mamdani walked home to Gracie Mansion from City Hall, evoking his walk down the length of Manhattan just before the primary. As his ninety-eighth day in office became his ninety-ninth, he’d visit overnight work sites in Queens, an all-hours show of appreciation for city workers that called to mind the late nights and early mornings that he spent cheering on Department of Sanitation crews during winter snowstorms. (The administration was young but possibly capable of nostalgia already.) The Mayor would round out his first hundred days with a celebratory rally at the Knockdown Center on Sunday (day a hundred and two). In the meantime, a flurry of press releases read like self-issued report cards attesting that he was a pleasure to have in office. But his hope, he said, was to use the hundred-day mark to call attention to the “often unrecognized” labor of the municipal workforce. “The position of being the mayor comes with a platform,” he told me. “The reality is that you are only able to accomplish things because of the team that is around you.”

So, between 11:00 P.M. Wednesday night and 1:00 A.M., his motorcade prowled Queens. In the ambulance bay at Elmhurst Hospital, Fire Department emergency workers were waiting for calls. On Exit 4 of Jackie Robinson Parkway, a Department of Transportation road crew was repaving an on-ramp. And, on a quiet residential street in St. Albans, a team from the Department of Environmental Protection was using equipment that it compared to a stethoscope to check for subterranean water leaks. At each location, the Mayor, wearing a departmentally appropriate windbreaker and an expression that conveyed indefatigably active listening, asked city workers how many years they’d been on the job. Cameras bobbed and staffers thronged. (“He rolls pretty deep,” I overheard the F.D.N.Y. commissioner, Lillian Bonsignore, observe.)

In St. Albans, a bus driver leaving home to start her shift at the Queens Village Depot was shocked to find the Mayor standing in the middle of her street. “I told him thank you for coming about the water,” she explained, after they’d chatted for a moment and posed for a photo.

At Elmhurst, a resident in a Tufts University School of Medicine zip-up wandered out to see what was going on. “I went to Bowdoin,” he said, watching from the periphery as the Mayor inspected an ambulance. “Two years behind him.”

In Forest Park, Exit 4 vibrated underfoot as a steamroller advanced. The pavement was sticky if you stood in one place for too long. Mamdani (hard hat in place, D.O.T. windbreaker on) climbed aboard the truck responsible for spreading asphalt. For a while, he stood listening, as he’d been doing all night, to someone’s account of a job they’d had longer than he’d had his own.

“All right, let’s do it,” the Mayor said, preparing to take the driver’s seat.

The truck rumbled, and an operating engineer stationed at his side shouted the news down to the crowd gathered on the steaming pavement below: “THE MAYOR IS DOIN’ IT.” ♦

Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. He banned dogs from the capital for their “unappealing odor.” He renamed the months: January for himself, April for his mother. He was fond of melons. The second Sunday of August became National Melon Day. Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985 until his death, by cardiac arrest, in 2006. For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has, from the first day of his Presidency, posed an emergency to both his country and the world, even as he has ceaselessly invoked the language of “emergency” to inflate threats, suspend norms, and expand his own power. A decade ago, he was already making statements that flouted the ordinary standards of adult behavior. When it came to North Korea, for example, he alternated between cooing words of affection for Kim Jong Un and issuing taunts that mixed nuclear brinkmanship with masculine insecurity: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Trump embodies the notion that, with age, you become what you always were, only more so. In the final days of the 2024 campaign, he met with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. When asked whether he would deploy the U.S. military if China, under Xi Jinping, were to blockade Taiwan, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me, and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

The MAGA coalition has long countenanced Trump’s bigotry and cruelty. But now, with the repeated violations of an America First foreign policy, his poll numbers have plummeted. Since returning to office, Trump has ordered military strikes on Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, and has felt little need to provide a coherent rationale for any of them. According to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, of the Times, Trump and his national-security advisers gathered in the Situation Room on February 11th to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, argue for a coördinated attack on Iran. Even though the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, made their reservations plain—Rubio called Netanyahu’s talk of regime change “bullshit”—Trump blundered ahead. And, as in the days of the Turkmen dictator, everyone fell into line.

But when the Iranian regime failed to collapse or capitulate, when Netanyahu’s prediction of a national uprising failed to materialize, Trump turned to threats of war crimes and genocide against the very people he claimed to be helping liberate:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?

These were not the words of a strategist. They were the words of a maniac. And they had a galvanizing effect, though hardly in the way Trump might have intended. Some of his erstwhile acolytes—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones—seem to have woken up to how dangerous he has always been. Yet around the Cabinet table, at Mar-a-Lago, and in the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, it is gospel that his deranged threats forced a ceasefire and scored a major victory. The President’s war, though, seems poised to achieve little that was not already available through prewar diplomacy, or through some renewed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., the Iran nuclear deal secured by the Obama Administration.

In fact, the original sin of this disaster was Trump’s abandonment of that deal, in 2018. For all its limits, it had stalled Iran’s march toward an atomic weapon. But Netanyahu, long eager for a full-scale war against Iran—aimed not only at its nuclear program but at its proxies, such as Hezbollah—shrewdly played on Trump’s vanity and his contempt for Barack Obama. Trump destroyed the J.C.P.O.A. with nothing to replace it.

So the war stands as a strategic failure and a moral calamity. The ceasefire is already fragile. “The whole point of this exercise was supposedly to advance the cause of freedom in Iran,” Karim Sadjadpour, a Washington-based specialist on the country, said. “To go from ‘help is on the way’ to ‘we are going to wipe out your civilization’ is strategic malpractice.” According to Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert who formerly worked in Israeli intelligence, Trump’s principal envoys to the region, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, almost certainly misread Iran’s capabilities and intentions. “This is a colossal disaster and should never have happened,” Citrinowicz said, noting that it will “haunt the region and world for many years to come.”

In the opening days of the war, the United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and wiped out much of Iran’s defense and intelligence leadership, apparently believing that the regime would somehow give way to “moderates” and “pragmatists.” Instead, the theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in place, equally radical, equally repressive, and more determined than ever to acquire the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon. Why give up that pursuit, as Libya did, and leave yourself exposed, when you can, like North Korea, achieve it and deter attack?

Trump has gone far toward shattering what’s left of America’s global stature. His preposterous bluster about Greenland, Cuba, and NATO has undermined the postwar alliance. He has humiliated and betrayed the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. And all the while Vladimir Putin, who aims to press Ukraine for still more territory, and Xi Jinping, who keeps Taiwan in view, watch the spectacle of Donald Trump for what it reveals about both his instability and the cratering credibility of American leadership.

In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his Presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun is not yet known. ♦

This is drawn from, “Names and Faces: A Graphic Memoir.”

To be present in Hungary on the eve of its upcoming elections is to feel the tremors of a regime confronting the prospect of collapse. For the first time in nearly a generation, Viktor Orbán, who has governed the country continuously since 2010, appears genuinely vincible. The formidable apparatus that he constructed to fortify his reign—comprising servile media, an acquiescent judiciary, supportive think tanks, and other obedient institutions—suddenly looks precarious. To a visitor from Narendra Modi’s “New India,” Hungary announces itself as a mecca of twenty-first-century strongman rule. Donald Trump, too, is scaling up a model whose original preceptor was Orbán. This explains why Hungary occupies such an outsized place in the imaginations of MAGA conservatives who, raging against the perceived decadence of their own society, exalt it as the last bastion of an imperilled Christian West.

Orbán began his political career as an energetic anti-Communist. He achieved renown in 1989, when, at a reburial ceremony for Imre Nagy—the Hungarian leader slain for revolting, three decades earlier, against the Moscow-backed government—he demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from his country. The Eastern Bloc was starting to unravel, and Fidesz, the political outfit that Orbán co-founded the year before, had been conceived as an engine of liberal reform. One of the first people to notice Orbán’s potential was George Soros, the Hungarian-born tycoon—vilified today by Orbán’s disciples as a globalist puppeteer—whose foundation gave him a grant to do research at Oxford. Orbán returned home after three months to steer Fidesz. In Hungary’s first fully free election, in 1990, the Party made a decent showing. Eight years later, it entered government as part of a coalition headed by Orbán—the youngest Prime Minister in Europe at the time—who presided over a period of relative prosperity. After decades of Communism, the economy expanded; Hungary joined NATO and was on its way to full membership in the European Union.

In the next election, in 2002, however, Orbán was defeated by a slim margin. That setback, according to those who knew him well, wounded him—and transformed him. In government, Orbán could be composed and high-minded. In opposition, he became coarse, abrasive, and truculent. Until the loss, Fidesz had largely been regarded as a party of the urban middle class. Orbán superintended its conversion into a nationalist force, devoting himself to making it an organizational juggernaut in rural Hungary. Fidesz, increasingly dependent on its leader, gradually became indistinguishable from him. Orbán proclaimed the Party the authentic home of the Hungarian nation, and the homeland, he contended, “cannot be in opposition.”

In 2010, Fidesz, assisted in part by the bruises inflicted by the global financial crisis, won a sweeping parliamentary majority. Orbán acted swiftly to entrench himself. His government promulgated a new constitution after just nine days of debate in the National Assembly. Ideologically, the charter obliged the state to safeguard “Christian culture,” privileged the heterosexual family structure, and laid down that life be protected from the moment of conception. (A subsequent decree made it mandatory for women seeking an abortion to listen to the fetal heartbeat before receiving access to the procedure.) These and other key areas of social policy would be unrepealable without a super-majority. Practically, the new constitution reduced the number of seats in Parliament by half and redistricted the electoral map to grant Fidesz a distinct structural advantage. It introduced a “winner compensation” mechanism that redirected surplus votes from victorious candidates in individual districts to bolster the majority party’s national list, further augmenting its lead. Political parties were disincentivized from forming coalitions—which might have unified the anti-Orbán vote—by incrementally raising the threshold required for alliances to enter Parliament. Orbán, replacing Hungary’s liberal constitutional system with a centralized executive model, converted Fidesz’s moral vision into the organizing principle of the state.

He then lowered the judicial retirement age, so that he could stack the courts, and packed state agencies with loyalists. His inner circle grew fabulously wealthy: a recent investigation by the Financial Times found that companies controlled by thirteen of Orbán’s closest associates, including his son-in-law, received government contracts worth twenty-eight billion euros between 2010 and 2025. (Hungary’s richest man, Lőrinc Mészáros, a former gas fitter, credits his fortune to “God, luck, and Viktor Orbán.”) Oligarchs scooped up major publications and donated them to a consolidated media foundation, co-opting the free press and turning it into the Prime Minister’s bullhorn. A network of lavishly endowed nonprofits, which oversee universities, cultural bodies, and state assets worth billions of euros, was established as a vehicle for dispensing patronage. Orbán did not so much dismantle Hungary’s democracy as reconfigure its organs from within.

Rapid institutional capture was accompanied by relentless exploitation of Hungary’s historical traumas, dating to the end of the First World War, when it was deprived of more than two-thirds of the territories it administered, as well as a third of its population. Many ethnic Hungarians ended up inside the newly drawn borders of foreign states. In a crowning irony, Orbán, setting himself up as a ruthless defender of sovereignty and an uncompromising proponent of the assimilation of minorities, intervened in the internal affairs of neighbouring states—Serbia, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine—by giving more than a million ethnic Hungarians there the right to vote in his country’s elections. These recently enfranchised Hungarians in the “near-abroad,” a reliably pro-Orbán constituency, are allowed to vote by post. Meanwhile, expatriate Hungarians in cities such as Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and London—a smaller contingent, deemed unreliable by virtue of their exposure to cosmopolitan societies—must queue up at diplomatic missions.

At home, avenues for campaigning were methodically closed for Orbán’s opponents. Companies loyal to the Prime Minister bought out billboards, and they mainly advertised Fidesz. When the opposition sought to hang posters on lampposts and utility poles, the government, invoking concerns about road safety, at one point stepped in to outlaw the practice. All this labor—all of it legal—paid off. Fidesz, whose popularity dropped sharply in the aftermath of the passage of the new constitution, was reëlected with parliamentary super-majorities in the next two elections, in 2014 and 2018, despite receiving less than fifty per cent of the vote.

Orbán presented himself as the guardian of a permanently besieged people. He made the European Union his bête noire, likening it to the foreign powers—Vienna, Moscow—that had sought to subjugate Hungary in the past. He cast Soros as the architect of a shadowy plot to flood Europe with migrants, whom Orbán labelled “poison.” The government then proceeded to pass a series of so-called Stop Soros laws, which introduced criminal penalties for anyone accused of facilitating irregular migration—effectively criminalizing the provision of assistance to asylum seekers.

Sniffing the air each morning for the scent of those who wish his country ill, Orbán has alighted on a new enemy: Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine. Orbán, who refused to sever Hungary’s ties to Moscow following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has repeatedly obstructed European efforts to aid Kyiv. In February, seizing on a dispute with Ukraine over the security and operation of the Druzhba pipeline—a crucial conduit for Russian oil to Hungary that was damaged by a Russian strike—he blocked a multibillion-dollar E.U. loan package. The following month, Hungarian authorities impounded a convoy of vehicles from Ukraine’s state bank that was transiting the country. Zelensky, according to Orbán, is now retaliating against Hungary by activating his sleeper agent: Péter Magyar, Orbán’s opponent in the election, and the first serious challenger to his rule. We’d call this surreal—if it weren’t so real. Across Budapest, hoardings are plastered with posters bearing sinister-looking mug shots of Zelensky and Magyar, accompanied by the warning “DANGER. LET’S STOP THEM.”

What is missing from Fidesz’s campaign is much mention of the state of Hungary. This is because the conservative Eden that Orbán claims to have created, supposedly envied by Europeans who seek its destruction, is in reality a spectacular kleptocracy cloaked by lofty sermons on “tradition.” The philosopher András Lánczi, an erstwhile adviser to Fidesz, once argued that what detractors considered corruption was “the most important policy goal of Fidesz” because it spawned “a domestic entrepreneurial class.” Now, at the end of Orban’s fourth successive term, ordinary Hungarians are being battered by a severe cost-of-living crisis. The country’s inflation rate has recently been among the highest in Europe. Young, educated Hungarians are leaving for opportunities abroad. The state of Hungary’s under-resourced health-care system is so dire that, since 2020, more than seven hundred wards have been subject to closure owing to such problems as lack of equipment and bedbug infestation. I met a coder in Budapest who told me that he was working two extra jobs—one as a taxi-driver, one as an online tutor—to save up enough money so that his pregnant wife could deliver their baby at a nonpublic hospital. “We cannot afford private health care, but I cannot risk my wife’s life to an infection,” he said. “We cannot risk our unborn child’s life.” Hungarians living near the southern frontier, where Orbán made a show of building a border fence during the refugee crisis, are travelling to Croatia to buy cheap groceries. Orbán’s Hungary is, by most credible international indices, the most corrupt, least free, and poorest member of the E.U.

Hungary under Orbán has become a haven for conservative ideologues from the United States who share its preoccupations with national identity, demographic homogeneity, and cultural conformity. Some, in exchange for gigs at the Fidesz-run enterprises, supply Orbánism its pseudo-intellectual gloss. Where will all these sciolistic refugees from woke America go if that largesse dries up? What will become of “Christian values,” national purity, and “Western civilization” once their protector has fallen?

It was to avert this tragedy that, in March, at the Hungarian edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a contingent of transcontinental MAGA luminaries and culture-war grifters lined up to exalt Orbán. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, had already flown to Budapest to tell him, in front of cameras, that “President Trump is deeply committed to your success.” Trump, having blessed Orbán via a video message at CPAC, this week dispatched Vice-President J. D. Vance to Hungary to shore up the Prime Minister’s chances. On Tuesday, Vance arrived in the capital and extolled Orbán’s leadership as a “model for the Continent.” At an election rally that evening, he told voters that his country and theirs were both “shaped, above all and beyond all, by the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ.” The Trump Administration’s loud support notwithstanding, Hungarians have grown measurably less enamored of their leader. Independent opinion polls show support for Fidesz has dropped to its lowest level in years.

A few weeks ago, I travelled to Székesfehérvár, southwest of Budapest, to see Magyar at a rally. This is deep Orbán country. The house in which Orbán was born, in Felcsut, is only a short drive away. It was a miserable evening—cold, drizzly, windswept—but more than a thousand people, young and old, had gathered in the town square to listen to Magyar. He spoke for close to an hour, introducing the local candidates, promising reform—he has, for instance, pledged to audit every government contract ever awarded by Orbán. “Step by step, brick by brick, we are taking back our homeland,” he shouted, to a wave of applause. What stood out for me, however, was his total submission to the grating demands of retail politics. For another hour after his speech, his sixth that day, Magyar smiled for photos with members of the throng. By my count, he took more than six hundred selfies. It is candidate-to-voter outreach of this kind that has helped him break through in an electoral battleground of fewer than eight million voters, dominated by a cutthroat political machine.

One of those pictures was with Luca Gamauf, a university student. She was four years old when Orbán was elected in 2010, and grew up, she told me, feeling hopeless all the time. “Every time we had elections, we didn’t have a party that could win against this government,” she said. After the most recent election, in 2022, which Orbán won with a crushing majority, she planned to leave Hungary to study abroad, as so many of her friends had done, but decided to stay back when Magyar appeared on the scene. “He just gave us hope that we can be a better country,” she said.

Until recently, Magyar was an anonymous, well-to-do Fidesz apparatchik. Trained as a lawyer, he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and held postings in Brussels and senior positions in state-linked corporations in Hungary—a beneficiary of the power vertical that he now wants to upend. He was pedigreed, too: his great-uncle had served as the country’s President, and his ex-wife, Judit Varga, was Orbán’s justice minister until 2023. Magyar’s rupture from Fidesz was provoked by a scandal involving a Presidential pardon for another insider—a man with a long connection to Orbán—who had been convicted of covering up child sexual abuse at an orphanage in Bicske, a small town near Orbán’s birthplace.

Orbán had survived other ignominies—in 2020, József Szájer, a preëminent ally who once bragged about writing Hungary’s new constitution on his iPad, was caught by Belgian police attempting to escape a lockdown-violating gay orgy in Brussels, by sliding down a drainpipe—but complicity in hushing up the molestation of vulnerable children was a body blow to a party that built its identity on “family values” and Christian traditionalism. When the news broke, in February of 2024, Katalin Novák, the President, who granted the pardon reportedly at the urging of the government, was forced to resign. Magyar’s ex-wife, Varga, who had countersigned the pardon papers as justice minister, was pushed out of parliament.

Magyar, then barely known to ordinary Hungarians, denounced the government as a cowardly regime “hiding behind women’s skirts.” He released a clandestinely recorded conversation with Varga, in which she spoke of interference by high-ranking members of the Orbán government in a high-profile corruption case. Varga, who had divorced Magyar the previous year, said that she had been in a “state of intimidation” during the recording and had said what he “wanted to hear” because she wished to “get away as soon as possible.” But the public was receptive, and Magyar quickly evolved into a formal opposition leader, accepting the helm of the Tisza Party—founded in 2020—as a vehicle for his movement. He deployed against Fidesz the lessons that he had absorbed from it. Hungary lives in the countryside—only eight cities have a population exceeding a hundred thousand people—and that is where Magyar concentrated his attention. He launched his first electoral campaign, for the European Parliament, in 2024, in one of the country’s poorest regions, and visited places that other opposition figures had neglected. At first, Orbán ignored Magyar. But when Magyar’s party won roughly thirty per cent of the vote, taking second place with seven seats, he realized that Magyar was a contender to watch. In the two years since, Tisza has completely eclipsed Hungary’s old institutional opposition—a fractured gamut ranging from the far right to the left.

For all Magyar’s rhetoric, his politics do not actually represent a comprehensive break from Orbán. They are, in many respects, animated by the pieties of Orbánism. Magyar is still a nationalist, though a more inclusive one, and he will, as one of his closest aides told me, be a “severe Prime Minister,” willing to conflict with Europe when necessary. Magyar’s most disturbing similarity with Orbán is his personality. He can be boorish, domineering, and self-imposing. At the rally I attended, candidates and aides were unwilling to speak on the record. It was not difficult to discern that their reluctance was born of a strong fear of upsetting their leader. At this point, as one aide put it, Tisza is Magyar, and Magyar is Tisza.

Even among those who have spent years tangling with Orbán, there is a lingering unease with what Gergely Karácsony, the green, liberal mayor of Budapest, calls Magyar’s “authoritarian” tendencies. Karácsony is one of those decent, upstanding politicians which degraded systems sometimes throw up unexpectedly. When the news of the horrors at the children’s home in Bicske emerged, it was Karácsony, in his capacity as the mayor of Hungary’s capital, who, despite having had no hand in it, offered a public apology. Orbán never did. And last summer, when the government banned the Budapest Pride parade by citing a child-protection law that prohibits events “promoting homosexuality” to minors—and authorized the police to use facial-recognition software to find and punish anyone who participated—Karácsony mobilized one of the largest marches in Budapest’s history. Hungarians of all backgrounds turned up to assert their freedom to assemble. Some carried satirical placards depicting Orbán in queer-themed attire. In January, Orbán’s prosecutors struck back by charging Karácsony with breaking the law. But, as Karácsony sees it, the Pride march was the beginning of Orbán’s end: it turned a deeply feared ruler into a “laughingstock,” which, he pointed out, is “the most dangerous thing for an authoritarian regime.”

In Karácsony’s view, liberal Hungarians are willing to overlook Magyar’s seeming defects because they want to see “Orbán burn.” Even he has come to believe that Magyar may be the “hammer”—forged in the same crucible as Orbán—that Hungarians need to bring the Prime Minister down.

The election is more than a contest between Magyar and Orbán. It has devolved into a proxy struggle—between Europe and Russia, and between Brussels and the Trump Administration—with Ukraine at its center. In late March, leaked conversations between Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, started to appear in the press. The two men spoke with disdain for Europe, and Szijjártó agreed to help in removing an Uzbek-Russian oligarch’s sister from a European sanctions list. In another call, Szijjártó offered to share with Lavrov a document about Ukraine’s accession to the E.U. Despite exposing the extent of the comradeship between Moscow and Budapest, these exquisitely timed disclosures, far from damaging Orbán—who never made a secret of his relationship with Moscow—have allowed his government to brush off the interactions as essential diplomacy and claim that foreign interests are meddling in Hungarian affairs. In recent days, another leak—of a call between Orbán and Vladimir Putin—has been held up as evidence of the former’s subservience. But, for all the sensationalism that has attended the reporting of this story, nothing that Orbán said privately deviated from his public positions.

Even if Orbán were to lose the election, Europe’s ability to support Ukraine ultimately depends on the United States, not Hungary, and Washington is drifting in another direction. Speculation is mounting that, in hindering Europe, Orbán is not doing Putin’s bidding—he is following Trump’s orders. Orbán’s departure might bring a moment of relief, but his role as spoiler can easily be filled by Slovakia’s Robert Fico, another leader allergic to Brussels.

Russia, in any event, is a convenient foil for Europe’s own shortcomings in Hungary. Recently, even some of Orbán’s critics, smarting at what they see as Brussels’s preferential treatment of Ukraine over Hungary, have been compelled to rally behind him. Last month, Zelensky warned that if Orbán did not stop obstructing assistance to Kyiv, Ukrainian armed forces would “speak to him in their own language.” It was an extraordinary remark—the head of a foreign state threatening the leader of an E.U. country. Brussels issued only a perfunctory rebuke. The Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, who served as the European Council’s president, urged maximum understanding for Zelensky. In the eyes of many Hungarians, this didn’t merely validate Orbán’s grievance against the E.U.—it also pushed his most prominent critics, including Magyar, into a corner.

Putin, for his part, will not abandon Hungary if Orbán falls. If he can build bridges with Ahmed al-Sharaa after the flight of Bashar al-Assad from Syria, he can bring himself to work with Magyar. He has already stated that Russia will continue to supply gas to Hungary as long as it remains a “reliable partner.” This is not only an endorsement of Orbán. It is also a message to his rival. Magyar can scarcely afford, in this time of economic hardship, to forgo Russian energy. (His party, too, has pledged to oppose Ukraine’s accelerated accession to the E.U.)

Magyar’s main appeal to the Hungarians is emotional. It is his promise to clean up the country, to make Hungarians proud of it, which has made him a source of hope, especially for young voters. But a straight victory will not be enough to remake Hungary. He’ll need a two-thirds majority in Parliament to reform the constitution. A narrow win for Tisza could allow Fidesz, with its institutional dominance, to paralyze Magyar. Karácsony told me that Orbán, rather than fade away, would become energized; like Trump after the 2020 Presidential election, he will start working to retake power from “Day One” of losing it.

And what if Orbán, who was also underestimated in 2022, is reëlected? A great deal will depend on the size of his triumph. If he wins in a landslide, receiving a majority of the popular vote and a large proportion of parliamentary seats, he will almost certainly use it to contrive novel legal means to bombproof Fidesz’s rule. Magyar may be charged with and convicted of some violation of the law that disqualifies him from public life. The MAGA right will be galvanized and Europe will be plunged further into self-doubt. If Orbán’s victory is small—if he loses the popular vote and gains a parliamentary majority—Hungary will enter a period of chaos. When the expectation of change collides with a system configured to withstand change, combustion often follows. Hungarians who have rallied behind Magyar, especially the young, will either sink into a state of despair and resignation and recede from politics—or they will pour into the streets and bring the capital to a halt. At that point, something terrible, something on the scale of the Maidan protests in Ukraine in 2014, is not inconceivable. The only thing we can be certain of is this: on April 13th, Hungarians will wake up in the most consequential phase of their modern history since the demise of Communism. ♦

The brilliant seventy-seven-year old German-born artist Isa Genzken makes work that, like her near-contemporary David Hammons’s, not only defines her epoch but shatters it. Assembling sculptures with a variety of materials, ranging from concrete and plastic children’s toys to film and pantyhose, Genzken has, throughout her career, put together shows that are environments rather than installations—environments that destabilize the viewer by playing up the artist’s love of schematic improvisation. To enter a Genzken show is to see that she has a plan, but there’s no road map: her work is best viewed or, rather, understood when you accept the open-ended order she employs to create the elements of her pieces, resulting in a kind of Teutonic chaos.

“Untitled,” from 2016.Art work by Isa Genzken / Glenstone Museum Collection / © VG Bild-Kunst / Courtesy the artist / David Zwirner / Galerie Daniel Buchholz

You can see this at work in the terrific show “Projects for Outside,” at Galerie Buchholz (through April 25), which looks closely at public spaces; New York is a big feature here, along with its architecture and scale. In Genzken’s hands, examining height and content becomes a fantastic exploration of the politics that define a world divided between the queer and the straight, a universe delineated by grids that do not, even with the best of intentions, stay orderly, because how can they? We’re humans living every day in the mess of history, whether we know it or not. There are some pieces in another show of hers currently on at 52 Walker, “Vacation” (through April 18), that are similar to those you’ll see uptown at Buchholz. Pieces from the great “World Receiver” series, on view here and at Buchholz, are very funny; they’re blocks of cement with aerials attached, but what does cement receive, or communicate? Yet, whereas the Buchholz show has a very clear and elegiac focus, the show at 52 Walker—which takes its title from Genzken’s proclamation that “the entire art system urgently needs a vacation”—offers a different and, in a way, more contained, vanilla view of the artist’s far-ranging intellect and sense of play amid the rubble of the world. Still, no matter how schematic she gets, you can’t hold Genzken down. She’s there to trouble you because she’s a firm believer in good and bad trouble, that which makes the world go round.—Hilton Als

Joe Mantello’s wrenchingly beautiful, simple staging of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” is set in a decaying underworld, a cavernous garage with colossal, chipped columns and a red sedan that looms like an altar. Lying in this crypt is Nathan Lane’s Willy Loman, a tragic humbug, his delusions contradicted by the ruins around him. Lane’s is a tender take on the role: he’s a little guy punching above his weight, not a bruiser gone to seed—a hype man haunted by two pairs of sons, past and present, who roam, wearily, through his splintered psyche. It’s a soulful interpretation that’s perfectly matched by Christopher Abbott’s quietly turbulent Biff, whose heroic breakdown at Lane’s knees—“I’m nothing!”—is so powerful that it threatens to bring the columns tumbling down.—Emily Nussbaum (Winter Garden; through Aug. 9.)

In the early nineties, the British indie band Heavenly struck out in pursuit of the most infectious guitar-pop melody. Born from the embers of the eighties band Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, led by the singer and guitarist Amelia Fletcher, shuffled forward with her riffy, effervescent playing style, gradually growing more sophisticated across four LPs and an EP, without any loss of buoyancy. Right before the release of “Operation Heavenly” (1996), Amelia’s brother, Mathew, the band’s drummer, died by suicide, and the band’s remaining members retired its name. They reconvened for a one-off, as Marine Research, but broke up in 1999. This February, after a nearly thirty-year absence, Heavenly returned, with a new album, “Highway to Heavenly,” shambling on with its holy mission.—Sheldon Pearce (Bowery Ballroom; April 18.)

Raye.Photograph by Aliyah Otchere

The début album by Raye, “My 21st Century Blues,” felt like a win for artists. Nearly a decade in the making, the LP was issued independently by the British singer-songwriter after a public dispute with and separation from Polydor, her label of seven years, which she claimed would not release her record. When “My 21st Century Blues” was finally liberated, it was a revelation—personal and singular, curious and self-confident, blending blues, house, and dancehall with pop, and breaking the record for the most Brit Awards wins in a night. Her new album, “This Music May Contain Hope,” is even more ambitious, if a bit melodramatic, its wide-screen cinematic drama splitting the difference between earnestness and theatricality.—S.P. (Radio City Music Hall; April 15-16.)

This spring is seeing a rare flocking of “Firebird” ballets: first, there was the return of Alexei Ratmansky’s, at American Ballet Theatre, and upcoming is the familiar appearance of Balanchine’s at New York City Ballet. But the most important sighting of the mythical Stravinskian fowl might be the revival of Dance Theatre of Harlem’s 1982 version, migrating back to New York for the first time in more than twenty years. Choreographed by the Balanchine associate John Taras, it flourishes in the lush Caribbean fantasy of Geoffrey Holder’s sets and costumes. The Harlem dancers also ignite more recent works, by Robert Garland and William Forsythe.—Brian Seibert (New York City Center; April 16-19.)

A.I.M by Kyle Abraham performs “Cassette Vol. 1.”Photograph by Christopher Duggan

A London-based friend introduced me to the choreographer Kyle Abraham’s work at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 2025, and, while watching his piece “An Untitled Love,” I experienced a feeling that I hadn’t had in the theatre in quite some time: love—not only for the dancers, the choreography, and the setting but for the ethos, which was, ultimately, about how joyful connections can be, should be. At Skirball, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham performs the New York City première of Abraham’s “Cassette Vol.1.” The piece draws on the choreographer’s love of eighties pop culture, on R. & B. and New Wave music, on artists who came before him, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane among them. I can’t imagine that the work isn’t a poem—poetry in motion—itself.—Hilton Als (Skirball; April 16-18.)

Howard Brookner’s extraordinary 1985 documentary, “Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars,” makes one weep for what could have been, and what was. We watch as the great and charismatic director Wilson collaborates with six international theatre companies, in Germany, Japan, the U.S., and elsewhere, to put on a twelve-hour work about war, power, and humanity for the 1984 Summer Olympics, in Los Angeles. We learn something about Wilson’s childhood in conservative Waco, Texas, and his process, as described by collaborators such as the composer Philip Glass and the performer Sheryl Sutton. Tall, queer, and handsome, Wilson navigates the fund-raising world with an elegance and calm that belies the cliché of the “fiery” director, while Brookner’s camera is anything but aggressive.—H.A. (BAM Rose Cinemas; April 17-23.)

Illustration by Holly Szczypka

I hail from a long line of women who love a good bargain: flea-market hagglers, dollar-bin divers, Maxxinistas. The thrill of the deal can get me into trouble, though; a few years back, I forbade myself from acquiring stuff merely because it was on sale. Imagine my surprise (and slight trepidation) then, when I recently came across Martie, a splashy-looking online discount site that was packed with items I already liked—Olipop sodas, Partake cookies, Momofuku noodles, Bonne Maman jams, Bastide soaps, Fishwife smoked salmon—all heavily marked down, some at more than seventy per cent off. What was the catch? I called up one of the founders, Kari Morris, who explained to me that, in 2021, she and her business partner, Louise Fritjofsson, founded Martie after seeing a gap in the discount-retail marketplace. Morris and Fritjofsson’s first venture, in 2019, was a line of artisanal baking mixes. One holiday season, they found themselves with more than a thousand unsold boxes of vegan gingerbread mix. Their options were to donate the excess inventory, sell it off to an old-school resale chain like TJ Maxx, or chuck it. They felt that there had to be a more exciting way to give perfectly usable products a second life—so they created it. Martie now buys bulk overstock from trendy companies, then ships orders from its Texas warehouse. Many of the constantly rotating goods have a best-by date within six months, but it also sells some brand-new items, both from emerging businesses hoping to find new fans and from brands that are sunsetting (such as, currently, Areaware, a soon closing home-goods purveyor). “We want to take the ‘ick’ out of liquidation,” Morris told me. She also noted that, while Martie’s ultimate mission is to reduce waste, in these precarious times, the savings are the biggest draw. “A lot of people want to do good,” she said. “But everyone wants a really good deal.”

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• A treasury of dedications
• The ultimate “Cribs”
• How John Steinbeck tricked his kids into reading

Since the U.S. and Iran agreed to a temporary ceasefire, on Tuesday night, Israel has continued pummelling Lebanon with air strikes, killing more than three hundred people on Wednesday and wounding over a thousand more. After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, in February, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia paramilitary group in Lebanon, fired missiles at Israel; this was followed by a heavy Israeli response across the country, and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Israel has forced out over a million people from their homes, and killed more than a thousand, in a country of some five million, vowing to hold many of these areas as buffer zones. (The Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, has compared the strategy to the one his country used in Gaza.) And the New York Times reported that Israel has recently made allowances for religious groups other than Shia Muslims to remain in the “evacuation zone.” Meanwhile, Israel and Lebanon are set to hold talks next week, but Iran and the United States have not yet reached an agreement on whether the ceasefire covers Israeli operations in Lebanon.

I recently spoke by phone with Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center, who lives in Lebanon and was in Beirut when we talked. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Israel is really trying to accomplish in Lebanon, the changing political fortunes of Hezbollah, and how Lebanese civilians are dealing with the war.

It seems that Israel has attacked areas across Lebanon, including Beirut, with huge civilian populations. Can you talk about what the past few days have been like?

Devastating. It’s not just about the bombs dropping around us but, also, about the anxiety, the frantic calling of friends and family to make sure they’re fine. The areas that were hit were considered relatively safe, to the extent that you can be safe in a war, but they were considered relatively safe. There’s no predominant military presence in these areas.

By military presence, you mean Hezbollah presence?

Hezbollah, yes. And I’m not describing the lack of a military presence to justify that this means it’s O.K. to hit certain areas, but not these areas. But, still, there is no predominant military presence of Hezbollah or any other political/military/non-state actor in these areas. So it was quite a shock to have entire residential buildings flattened in the space of minutes, a hundred air strikes or so in the space of ten minutes across Lebanon. It was really shocking. And then came the air strike at 7:00 P.M., in Beirut, which was the final air strike they did in the evening on Wednesday that also brought down an entire residential building. They’re still looking for survivors now. So I feel like I’m still shell-shocked, frankly.

I appreciate you telling people that. I’ll turn to some broader questions now. We talked several weeks ago about Israel and Lebanon, but can you tell people what has changed, and what Israel has done in this war so far in southern Lebanon?

They’re now occupying significant chunks of the south of Lebanon. They’ve ordered the mass evacuation of almost fifteen per cent of Lebanese territory. More than a million people have been displaced, and counting. Many of those will not be able to return. In a short time, half a million of those people were told to leave. So there’s that aspect of it. But there’s a sense that there is a deliberate ethnic cleansing of the Shia populations in the south. And I use this term very carefully, but that’s the impression that we all have, given the nature of the evacuation orders and the demographic nature of the towns and villages that are being evacuated.

What is it specifically that makes you use that term?

In the south, most villages are predominantly Shias. You also have villages that are mixed, and several that are predominantly Christian and Sunni too. Lebanon is a diverse country. I often talk about Lebanon as a regional public good. Frankly, it’s the one country in the region that, for all its ills, is a place where you have intersectarian relationships. People are forced to deal with each other, whether they want to or not. It’s a plural society. Israel’s evacuation orders have hit most of the south. They’ve asked all the villages south of the Litani River to leave, but now also the villages south of the Zahrani River, too. The predominant population there is also Shia. Plus, they’re dynamiting many of these villages. Last week, they dynamited a village that’s been around since the Roman era.

So the possibility of going back home to tend to your land, to live, is just not there anymore. On top of that, there is a clear attempt, and this was clear from last year, from the 2024 conflict, to depopulate the south. When you uproot more than sixty thousand olive trees, when you drop white phosphorus on agricultural land, rendering it unusable, which means that even people who are allowed to go back cannot go back, then people don’t have the economic livelihood that they had before. Most of these people are in agriculture. They’re farmers. So all of this adds up to literally depopulating areas in the south and kicking some of the Shias out.

There have been reports in the media that some other ethnic sects in southern Lebanon have been allowed to stay despite evacuation orders. Is that something you’ve heard as well?

We know that is true. It is mostly the predominantly Christian areas or Christian villages that have been allowed to stay. And they wanted to stay, and said so loud and clear: We’re not leaving because we’re terrified we may not be able to come back. The I.D.F. later said, “Well, if you don’t have Hezbollah fighters, fine. We’ll allow you to stay.”

What is happening today in the south is triggering a lot of anxiety for southerners because they saw what happened in Gaza. People’s homes are completely destroyed. People in Gaza were not allowed to go home. The memory of the Palestinian Nakba is also there. People left thinking they’d go back to their homes, but were never allowed to go back. We still have Palestinian refugees in Lebanon from that period. So, for the Lebanese, they’re terrified that once they leave, they may not be allowed to go back.

Is the stated Israeli reason for this that Shia communities in southern Lebanon are actually housing Hezbollah fighters and weapons, or is the idea that the Shia community more broadly gives political support to Hezbollah and therefore is a threat?

I think it’s a mix of both. There is a sense of collective punishment. You have two political parties that predominantly represent the Shia community, Amal Movement and Hezbollah. Not all the Shiites in Lebanon are supporters of Hezbollah. So there is a sense of collective punishment when you’re kicking a religious sect and saying, “No, you’ve probably supported Hezbollah, therefore you’re not allowed to come back. You’re guilty by default somehow.” As to the idea that many of these villages harbor Hezbollah, many of the Hezbollah fighters come from these villages. And, for them, they’re defending their land. They’re there to defend their land. I’m talking about the ones who are fighting now.

But this does not in any shape or form justify Hezbollah dragging Lebanon into this conflict, which was a conflict that everyone here was desperate to stay out of. That decision was made by Tehran in an attempt to turn Lebanon into another battlefront.

How much resistance is Hezbollah putting up on the ground? And, secondly, it seemed like the central government, before the war, had finally gotten more serious about disarming Hezbollah than it ever had before, but how has that gone in the last month or so? Is there an effort by the Lebanese state to disarm Hezbollah? As you say, a lot of Lebanese people are upset that they were dragged into this war.

Hezbollah has put up a lot of resistance fighting on the ground. It’s not about the rockets. It’s the actual resistance on the ground. This is their terrain. These are their homes. They know these areas very intimately. So they have put up resistance, and we see it. And they’re doing this while much of the setup they had in place prior to 2024, a lot of the military infrastructure, was destroyed by the Lebanese Armed Forces. Much of this, south of the Litani, had been cleared out.

But in terms of disarming Hezbollah more now, you cannot disarm them in the middle of a war. There were more than a hundred strikes in the space of ten minutes on Wednesday. So it’s very difficult to say you are going to be disarming this group in the midst of a conflict. But what the government has done is declare Beirut a city free of arms. This effectively means going into areas, setting up checkpoints, and making sure that there are no armed non-state actors in administrative Beirut. I think it’s an important move in a very big way. We have to wait and see how they’re going to implement this because it may put the Army at odds with local populations. Tensions are already very high. People are very polarized, and the I.D.F. just issued a new evacuation order, and not only for the suburbs. They’ve really expanded the area to the Palestinian camps and elsewhere.

I don’t know where these people are going to go. We don’t have enough shelters. This is a country that has no air defenses, it has no sirens, and it has no bomb shelters.

But the Lebanese President reached out again and said they need to be negotiating directly with the Israelis. So Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that he’s authorized direct negotiations with Lebanon. Meanwhile, there’s no ceasefire. Frankly, I’m not holding my breath over these negotiations, but at least it opens a window, a diplomatic window to spare Lebanon more destruction.

Lebanon is a country that has had to deal with many refugees, including Palestinian refugees and Syrian refugees, at different times. You said that over a million people in the south had to leave their homes. Where are they going and what sort of strain might that put on the rest of Lebanon, in addition to the obvious horror for the people who have to leave?

The government has, I think, done a really good job in its very rapid response. This is the most responsive government we’ve seen to crises. They have established shelters in public schools and used the sports stadium in Beirut. Still, while some people displaced by the war are staying with their families, some are staying with friends, and some are renting places and staying there, it has created a lot of tension on the ground for a number of reasons. I think, as time passes and resources dwindle, it’s going to be a race to the bottom. Two, there is the sense that the targeting we saw by Israel has placed a bull’s-eye on the displaced. Nobody wants to have a displaced person in their vicinity because everyone’s worried that they might be targeted by Israel. And it’s created a lot of tensions on the ground, a lot of accusations. We’ve seen some neighborhoods that have absolutely refused to even open the public schools for refugees.

In addition to being concerned about targeting, is there a sense from other people in the country that some Shias had brought this on themselves by supporting Hezbollah, and that Hezbollah dragged this country into the war?

It is an issue, but it’s a minority issue. Like all countries, you have different perspectives and points of view. So it is an issue, but I really would say it’s a minority issue. People are trying to help in any way they can. Even those who don’t want to host are trying to help in other ways, but there’s also a lot of anger. There’s a lot of anger at Hezbollah for having dragged Lebanon into this, and an understanding that the displaced are the ones, frankly, who are paying the price for Hezbollah’s military adventurism. So, yes, there are people who think that way.

Israel is talking about creating what they call a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, which, according to them, would make it harder for Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israel. Do you have a sense of what a buffer zone would look like?

This is not a buffer zone. This is occupied Lebanese territory, period. In 2024, they dynamited around towns and villages near the border with Israel. Now they’re dynamiting additional villages, and making it impossible for people to go back home. They’ve also blown up all the bridges crossing the Litani River. It’s a river, so it varies with the geography, but it’s about thirty kilometres from the Israeli border. All the bridge crossings have been blown up. So that part of Lebanon is now completely isolated from the rest of Lebanon. Now, whether they decide to maintain a military presence in these areas, how extensive that military presence will be, I’m not sure. But what I would say is that so long as there is one Israeli soldier on Lebanese land, this is going to reinforce and give credence to Hezbollah’s narrative that only military resistance is viable. They will say it’s the only way to liberate land. This has been their narrative for a long time. This continues to be the narrative today, and the occupation of any part of Lebanon is going to reinforce that in a very big way. I’m already seeing the shift. Even among, I would say, members of the Shia community who have been increasingly critical of what Hezbollah has done, now everyone is closing ranks and not just within the community, but I would say even among many Lebanese.

So you’re saying, despite the anger at Hezbollah for dragging Lebanon into the war, that any medium- or long-term occupation of Lebanese territory may in fact have the reverse effect, politically, of making people think that at least Hezbollah is talking about reclaiming land, when nobody else is?

Yes, absolutely. There’s a lot of anger at what Israel is doing. What they are doing just does not make sense beyond absolutely terrorizing an already terrified population. The anger and the shock at what happened yesterday will turn the tide; it is already turning the tide. Anger was growing against Israeli actions in Lebanon. The feeling is that they’re not just going after Hezbollah; they’re going after Lebanon.

How has the government responded?

There’s sufficient evidence of war crimes being committed in Lebanon, and they can lodge complaints, make a case in international courts, despite the fact that we’re seeing the undermining of multilateral institutions, like the U.N., globally, but, still, I think we need to have an insistence on these. They’re beginning to do that. But, at the same time, yes, there is an offer to negotiate with Israel. These direct talks would be breaking a massive taboo for the country. It’s not something that was acceptable at all, even six months ago, let alone a year ago.

And if there’s a longer occupation, I assume it will get harder.

I think it'll become impossible to negotiate. Look, all conflicts, at the end of the day, have to end with a political settlement somewhere along the line. A military offensive is not going to resolve the issues between Lebanon and Israel. It certainly will not get rid of Hezbollah. This is an organization that was born out of the rubble of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and which caused the deaths of twenty thousand people.

And these are Lebanese. This is not 1982, when Arafat was forced to leave Lebanon on a boat and went to Tunis. These are Lebanese. They’re not going to go anywhere. So we’re going to end up at the negotiating table sooner or later. And I think, if we don’t, we’re going to see many, many more Hezbollahs emerging. ♦